So, if you are a networking geek of any sort, you should be listening to PacketPushers–for both the education and the sheer entertainment value. This year, we tried something a little different with the PacketPushers team and had them join us onsite at CiscoLive. Below are six of the podcasts they produced for us:

We are proud of our customers and their success in the marketplace. They are changing the way business is done by providing scalable, enterprise-grade, secure, and affordable cloud solutions. By tying together the Unified Data Center with the Cloud Intelligent Network and applying Applications and Services on top as end-to-end solutions, these cloud providers are delivering differentiated services with high-level SLAs necessary for end-users’ strategic applications. That’s what US Signal is doing for their customers.

But for some more background, last week at Structure, the conversations swirled around how to handle Big Data, the future of software-defined networking, data center compute technology, database and programming types, and open versus proprietary. Two of our CloudVerse customers, Terremark and SunGard both had strong booth presence and Terremark also had a packed presentation delivered by Jim Anthony, VP, Tier II Solution Architecture Team. Compared to last year, there was a stronger agreement that cloud providers are fully capable of providing public or virtual private cloud services with trust, scalability, and affordability, instead of companies taking on cloud internally by themselves. There are many needs for cloud services out there and that means there are opportunities to provide a differentiated service.

As such, with data usage increasing exponentially, it’s clear how important the network is for connecting the many clouds out there. Let me explain how US Signal is leveraging their expertise with an end-to-end delivery network to success in cloud. Read More »

We’re pleased to announce that that Cisco’s and NetApp’s newFlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud solution is the first design validated by Microsoft for their updated Microsoft Private Cloud Fast Track 2.0 program.

Built on Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, and System Center 2012 this new FlexPod offer helps customer reduce infrastructure and application deployment times from days to hours while helping them achieve greater utilization of their physical and virtual resource pools.

Various integration points of the solution were demonstrated for the first time this week at Microsoft’s Management Summit 2012 (MMS) in the Cisco booth as well as the NetApp booth. Here MMS attendees learned about, and saw in real-time action, the extremely tight integration with System Center and Windows Server that both companies have engineered in the solution.

The Cisco UCS Management Packs and NetApp® OnCommand™ plug-in to System Center 2012 allowing customers to monitor and manage FlexPod and any applications running on top—from a single interface. Customers can then comprehensively manage NetApp storage systems and Cisco UCS from within System Center 2012, and they can automate compute and storage workflows across their cloud infrastructure.

Today’s Day 2 keynote at Microsoft’s Management Summit (MMS) here in Las Vegas focused on the world of connected devices and how IT organizations struggle at times to deliver quality services based on the demands of our anytime, anywhere, always on world.

One solution being demonstrated this week at MMS helps to resolve some of these issues. The Citrix XenDesktop on FlexPod with Microsoft Private Cloud solution is a joint effort between Cisco, Citrix, and NetApp in the Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) area. The solution helps to simplify, secure, and scale desktop virtualization on Cisco’s agile data center infrastructure based on Cisco UCS while also incorporating storage assets from NetApp and desktop assets from Citrix. All based on a Windows Server, System Center (including support for System Center 2012!), and Hyper-V environment.

This combination of technologies from Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, and NetApp has produced a highly efficient, robust and scalable Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for a hosted virtual desktop deployment. To learn more details about this new offering, please download the publicly available reference architecture at the link below:

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